By LANCE GAY, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Updated 10:00 pm, Tuesday, December 10, 2002

A century ago, the federal government launched one of its most unusual and controversial investigations, bringing in teams of volunteers -- dubbed by the press the "poison squad" -- to dine on food laced with poisons.

In the let-the-buyer-beware days before food companies were required to inform customers what's in the food they are selling, it was common to add embalming fluid to milk to stop curdling, cure hams with borax and heap teaspoons of aspirin in canned soup.

Some chemical concoctions labeled "strawberry jam" lacked even a trace of strawberries.

It should be no surprise that some people got sick. President William McKinley's secretary of war, Russell Alger, was forced to resign in the midst of a raging food scandal after "embalmed beef" fed U.S. troops during the Spanish-American War made men so sick they couldn't fight.

Butchers often employed "preservatine" -- a recipe of boric acid, salt and the red juice of the cochineal beetle -- so they could peddle rotten meat as fresh.

Harvey Wiley, who headed the Agriculture Department's bureau of chemistry, was convinced that dumping all these chemicals in food wasn't safe, and in 1902 Congress agreed for the first time to give him $5,000 to fund "hygienic table trials" that would judge the effects of food additives on humans.

The "poison squad" was launched.

Teams of able-bodied young men were brought to the basement of the bureau of chemistry's Washington offices and fed meals laced with borax, salicylic acid, copper salts, benzoid of soda, saccharine and formaldehyde to see what happened. No one died, but the experiments spread over the next five years led Congress to adopt the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the federal government's first effort to regulate additives in food.

Borax used in clothes softeners, salicylic acid (aspirin), formaldehyde (embalming fluid) and copper salts are no longer used as food additives, and the government long ago stopped using humans and started using rats to find out if additives are dangerous.

"O, they may get over it but they'll never look the same/ That kind of bill of fare would drive most men insane./Next week he'll give them mothballs a la Newburgh, or else plain./O, they may get over it but they'll never look the same."

Junod said that like other scientists, Wiley didn't like the notoriety his experiments received, and went to lengths to keep reporters and powerful food lobbyists away from what he was doing until he could compile his conclusions.

"I think they pretty much knew these (chemicals) weren't poisonous because they were things they were ingesting in their food already," she said. "These were not new and novel foods."

The scientific value of Wiley's study remains controversial and contested. Wiley stated his intention with the poison squad was to "substantiate the deleterious effects of food preservatives," and he didn't disguise his hope of getting the government to ban chemicals from food. Those participating in the trials were also aware of whether the foods contained chemicals or not because of the change in taste.

What Wiley said he found was that eating borax "will create disturbances of appetite, digestion and health," and he concluded the use of salicylic acid in food "reprehensible in every effect."

Of embalming fluid, he said: "The addition of formaldehyde to food tends to derange metabolism."

Some historians claim Wiley was a fraud who manipulated the results, a contention Junod rejects. She said that while the poison-squad experiments wouldn't meet modern standards for scientific tests, "he certainly was not a crook. He was a good chemist, and this was the heyday of chemistry."

Junod said many of those who participated in the trials actually ended up healthier than when they came off the streets because they regularly got square meals as part of the experiments.

One member of the poison squad, William Robinson of Falls Church, Va., was 94 years old when he died in 1979.

"It's what your mother tells you: Eat regular and well and no matter what happens, it will make you healthy," Junod said.

Wiley did concede eventually that the use of some chemicals in food might be harmless, and that the use of some preservatives might be beneficial by controlling the even more serious health effects from food spoilage.

But the main legacy of the unusual poison-squad experiments was to force Congress to pay attention to what was going into food, and establish the nation's first legal food standards.